The aggiornamento driven by the WAP has placed at the heart of the schools’ institutional reflection the dialectic between the One and the multiple. It presents itself differently depending on the experience and history of each school. How can the relation to the One of the Lacanian Orientation be conceived when there is no geographical centre towards which to converge? How can we treat localist temptations of the “them and us” type? How can we situate the involvement of non-members in the school, particularly that of the youngest?
The experience of the NEL shows that this makes it all the more necessary that the ONE of the School materialises, starting from a power of the School’s call, in different locations. As J.-A. Miller has explained, the School can thus become embodied at different moments, sometimes in one town, sometimes in another.
This reflection comes at a time when the signifier of diversity is being imposed everywhere, globally. It is interesting to return to the American sources of this notion, with its ideological, ethical and political implications. The ideology of diversity took its roots in the United States in the war against racial discriminations, which led to the institution of ethnic quotas, even though the Supreme Court held that they constituted an obstacle to the equality of the citizens before the law.
In France, the importation of positive discrimination in the 90s gave rise to debate, notably because it was contrary to republican law, which does not consider ethnicity as a legal discriminatory criterion. Equality before the law is guaranteed for everyone, regardless of origin, race, religion or belief.
Diversity has moved with the times and undergone a remarkable transformation from policies of integration in terms of the “right to be different” to those of “promoting diversity”, with the consideration in law and in public action of particular identifications. Since 2004, the term has undergone a potentially limitless semantic and practical extension, well beyond the ethno-racial dimension and against a backdrop of factors of “diversification”, including disability, age, sex, place of residence, educational background, “parentality”, physical appearance, etc., thus giving rise to increasingly fragmented communities, an infinite fragmentation favouring separatism.
The issue is based on the meaning to be given to the term integration. Does it not suppose a certain distance from one’s familial and cultural origins, an effort of abstraction whose essential stake is to be inscribed in the social bond which is not of the same type as the familial group. As Blandine Kriegel maintains, the social contract is an integration. We start from a fairly undifferentiated multitude, without necessarily a bond of unity and it is by consenting to give ourselves a common law that a people is created: “integration, to use the philosophical distinctions borrowed from Habermas, is not ethical, we do not ask people to all live under the same model, but it is political or civic, we ask them to integrate into a public space”.
In the Freudian field, isn’t the issue that the multiple is not separated from unity? When everything works in the manner of divergence, geographical distance, language and cultural diversity, it is important to come together, not around the warmth of being together, but essentially around the ultimate ends of our action: an aim at a distance from the imaginary, not all symbolic (regulations and statutes), but very real.
From the start, the WAP made the bet of a common orientation for its various Schools, a wager based on the unique gradus of the AS. This wager does not impose any regulations or standardised way of life on the schools. It nevertheless implies a work of homologation (admission, guarantee, pass) which aims to work in the opposite direction of divergence, and in favour of an orientation One given to the direction and conclusion of the treatment. Nevertheless, this unitary orientation is not synonymous to the triumph of undifferentiation. As J.-A. Miller underlined in his critique of mutualism, it is, on the contrary, “a means of reintroducing creative difference, a means of creating differences.” It assures the penetration of the new, favours the presence of the youth. The schools which extend to many countries such as the NEL or the NLS – and in which the geographical and cultural dispersion is considerable – have a dimension of mobile construction, a combination that can prove to be rich source of learning, including for the Schools that appear more homogeneous: how to make room for difference, for the multiple in a community that is united and integrated? Integration is to be taken in the mathematical sense of “integral”, and not of inclusion. Inclusion absorbs difference, while in an integral, each differential enters into function at the same time as it constitutes it: it is together that the “ill-assorted oddments” enter into function in order to constitute a properly analytic school carried by a unitary eros. . .